July 3 question – What are your favorite writing processing (e.g. Word, Scrivener, yWriter, Dabble), writing apps, software, and tools? Why do you recommend them? And which one is your all time favorite that you cannot live without and use daily or at least whenever you write?

I discovered Scrivener some time ago, and frankly haven’t looked back. While I don’t use all the features, or probably even half of them, I really like the idea of having all my stories in a particular series or section of my world in one place with space for notes to jot down character lists, animal socius lists, or other things I think would be of importance. Since I use Scrivener in this way, I don’t use it to format my ebooks. I use Jutoh for that, and it’s a windows pc based very reasonably priced piece of software I’ve used for a long time now.

For the short stories I write every month, I quite often use Microsoft Word. Some of these stories are meant for submission and this allows me to put them in manuscript format relatively easy.

My only concern with Scrivener is going to be probably sometime after October 2025, when Windows 10 goes “end of life”. Having worked on Windows 11 in the “day job”, I can resoundingly say I do not like it. And I’ve heard some security concerns that kind of make my hair stand on end with it, so I will most likely move over to Linux as much as possible by then. It doesn’t appear that Scrivener will be able to run on Linux natively, but there’s a program called “Wine” designed to run windows programs on Linux that I’ve heard manages Scrivener quite well.

I usually write stories set in my big shared world of Radio Arcanum and Musimagium, so having software that I can keep track of things is helpful, and why I am building a wiki on my website to list all of the characters and animal companions and spells, and such. So that way the readers have a place to reference, and well, so will I.